


nothing's only words, that's how hearts get hurt

by thelemonisinplay



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Memory Loss, Mental Health Issues, Tom Riddle's Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 17:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4529988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelemonisinplay/pseuds/thelemonisinplay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year she was eleven, Ginny Weasley spent a great deal of time fighting off a Horcrux.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothing's only words, that's how hearts get hurt

**Author's Note:**

> I found this lurking in my drafts on Tumblr (I have no idea when I originally wrote it) and cleaned it up a bit to post.
> 
> Title stolen from 'Hurts' by Mika, because titling is hard (and I'm going through a bit of a Mika phase at the moment).

She’s eleven years old and she spends most of the year in a bathroom, locked up with the howling ghost of a teenage girl. She writes in a little book to a boy who understands, and she hisses at a sink to let out a snake, and she doesn't remember any of it.

She thinks it’s just the stress of starting school, at first. She wakes up on the Sunday morning of her first week and finds that she can’t remember what she was doing the night before. And she’s worried, but she keeps it quiet. She doesn't want to seem weird, after all.

She misses her very first Halloween feast and a cat is Petrified and that message is daubed on the walls. She doesn't find out until the following morning. The other first-years are talking about it at breakfast - “oh, haven’t you heard, Ginny? Oh, that’s right, you weren't at the feast, where were you?”

She can’t for the life of her remember. 

She remembers attending her lessons: Transfiguration and Potions and Herbology and History of Magic (and it's only been two months, but she’s already given up on the idea of paying attention to Professor Binns; she spends the entire hour writing to Tom). She remembers lunch, remembers giggling over something with Colin and Lucy. She remembers George passing her in the corridor and ruffling her hair, and she remembers shoving him away and scowling after him.

Everything after History of Magic is a bit blurry, though. She remembers being in the common room - and then she thinks she remembers something about Moaning Myrtle - but she can’t work out what she was doing instead of attending the feast.

“I felt a bit sick,” she says in this tiny, constricted voice, because her throat feels all funny and her chest feels oddly tight and all she can think about is that something horrible happened and she has no alibi.

(She notices, later, that her robes from the previous day are all covered in paint, and that tightness of her chest comes back and she spends a moment just staring at them, hands tightly clutched into fists, because - well, it's the same paint that the message on the wall is written in.)

But she pushes it away. Or, at least, she tries. She can’t seem to stop herself crying, though, to the point where Percy keeps checking up on her, incessantly asking if she's okay. Even Ron seems to notice she’s upset. And she can’t stand it, because when she’s upset they start treating her like a baby, and she really thought that school might have been a chance to prove herself as somebody grown up. 

And then Colin, who she’s tentatively starting to think of as a friend, is Petrified. It’s not meant to be common knowledge, but everyone seems to know anyway. She finds out the morning after again, and her insides seem to get all twisted up as she realises that all she can remember from the previous day is attending the Quidditch match.

She pulls away from everybody, terrified that she’s somehow influencing the horrible things that are happening, terrified that if she gets any closer to anybody they’ll be targeted. She finds herself barely concentrating in classes, doing the bare minimum of homework, spends more and more time hiding behind the red curtains of her four-poster bed. She doesn't think she’s ever been more scared in her life. 

The blank patches in her mind get worse and worse; and more people end up Petrified even though she’s been trying to avoid everybody; and somehow the entire school seems to believe that it’s all Harry’s fault, even though he’s really nice as well as being this wonderful hero - and then she gets the letter that Mum and Dad are going off to Egypt over Christmas to see Bill. “Let us know if you’d like to come too, dear,” her mother writes in the letter, but all she can think of is the number of people in Egypt that she might hurt; how much harder it would be to hide all the wrong in her head from her parents than from everyone at school. So she declines.

The only thing she can rely on is Tom; sweet, helpful, understanding Tom who lives in her diary. She can’t talk to anybody else (they’d just think she was mad as well as weird and quiet and bad at lessons), and she can’t help but think that nobody else would be quite so lovely about it all.

And then, for some reason, it occurs to her that he might be the problem. That maybe the diary is messing with her head. After all, she hadn’t had it long when she started school - and all the memory problems (and all the horrible, horrible things) started around the same time.

(It’s not like Tom is real, anyway, he’s just a friendly voice in a diary. He won’t miss her.)

She decides to chuck it down a loo, just to be sure. (She knows she’s got a bit … dependent on Tom and his friendship and his advice. And she needs to be sure she won’t go and try to get it back when things start getting hard, when the others in her year are a bit weird with her after all those months of hiding herself away.)

A week passes. Two weeks. She’s still scared (all the time) and she’s still struggling with lessons and friendships, but even so, she feels oddly free. It’s like her brain had been all covered in fog for the whole of last term, and she’s slowly, tentatively escaping it.

She still wants to talk to Tom. She keeps thinking of things to tell him - funny anecdotes, or how embarrassed she was when she’d tripped over in front of Harry, or how annoying it is that Percy keeps trying to check up on her. But she’s also noticed that she’s not had any of those horrible blank periods since she got rid of the diary; and that nobody has been Petrified in a while. So she keeps away.

And, blushingly, she writes that Valentine for Harry. She regrets it almost immediately after asking the dwarf to deliver it; but as it happens she barely even notices when it’s sung to him directly in front of her, or that everyone knows it was her that sent it. Because the diary - she flushed it away, she's sure she did, but somehow it’s shown up in Harry’s hands.

She can’t stop herself crying, and she knows everyone’s just assuming it’s because of the Valentine but it’s not. She's suddenly doubting her memory again - _did_ she flush the diary away? She remembers it, but all of a sudden she can't be sure, because Harry has it. What if Tom's told him everything? What if it starts affecting Harry, what if it starts sucking out his memories and making him do horrible, horrible things?

She leaves it a few weeks, just to see - to see if he starts treating her any differently; to see if he starts acting oddly and forgetting things; to see if all the problems start up again. 

And then it’s the Easter holidays and the last attack was ages ago, and it’s clear that there’s no way he’s being affected in the same way (and she’s not surprised, if she’s honest, because he’s so good and he’s such a hero already; and she’s just a silly little girl with silly little problems. Of course he wouldn't succumb in the way that she did).

But if he’s not being made to do all these mad things, then - well, he might still be talking to Tom. And Tom might be telling Harry all about all the horrible things she’s done. Harry might find out that she opened the Chamber.

The idea of getting the diary back after so long is terrifying, but the idea of it coming out that she opened the Chamber of Secrets is even more terrifying, honestly. And there’s still a little bit of her that really, really wants to have somebody to talk to again, and Tom was always so understanding. So she waits until she knows all the second-year boys are somewhere else, and sneaks up into the dormitory and steals it back.

She doesn’t want to write in it again. 

Honestly, she doesn’t.

But it’s there, right in front of her. The temptation. The idea of having somebody to talk to - somebody she can use as a sounding board, somebody to help her sort through all the fear and the mess inside her head - is so, so nice.

And so (crying and hating herself) she opens it. And she writes.

She doesn’t make it to the Quidditch match the next day. She doesn’t hear that it was cancelled until afterwards. And two people are Petrified (and it's Hermione, the third member of Ron and Harry's trio, and it's Percy's girlfriend Penelope, which makes it worse), and again she has no idea where she was or what she was doing at the time.

(She spends the evening hidden away behind her curtains again, crying and staring at the diary and wondering how she got back here.)

She tries to spend more time in the common room, after that particular incident (if she stays away from the diary, she thinks, she won’t write in it. And then she can’t do anything terrible). She tries to stick to her brothers - Fred and George are easiest, because she’s not attacked any of their friends, and plays silly card games to avoid talking too much.

The whole time, she’s sitting on this knowledge of what the problem is. She hasn’t forgotten that Harry had the diary for a long time (and she stole it from his bag, so it’s almost certain he’d been using it). She tells herself over and over and over again that she’s going to tell someone about what's been going on, about who's been opening the Chamber (and in her head, the ‘someone’ is only ever Harry, because he’s Ron’s best friend and he’s always been nice to her and he’s a hero, so he’s got to be trustworthy and he can probably help her).

But then, as she's about to finally explain the situation at breakfast one morning, Percy shows up. Percy, whose girlfriend she’d Petrified. Percy, who’s so strict about rules. Percy, who she’s certain could never forgive her for this (Ron’s made mistakes and neither he nor Harry are too fussed about rules and she has a feeling they’ll be just a little bit more understanding). And so she never says anything (she can’t) and she escapes and - and -

And then there’s a blank - and she knows she’s going to die and she’s crying and she’s writing on the walls again and then she’s in the Chamber and Tom’s going to kill her and she doesn’t know why he can make her do things when she doesn’t want to, but he can - and it’s all fuzzy and none of it makes any sense -

And then Harry’s there, somehow, all covered in blood and clutching the diary and that massive snake is dead, and she’s crying all over again, but it's over, he says. It's over.


End file.
